62 SOCIAL SCIENTIST then Rajputs are widespread all over northern India—but normally in our history books when we talk of the Rajput policy, we have very much in mind the relationship with the rulers of Rajasthan because these were the rulers with whom some of the closest links were made by the Mughals. I do not want to go into the controversy as to the motives of Akbar in entering into this alliance, whether it was the starting point of a new type of a state or whether it was a Machiavellian effort on his part to make Rajputs fight against Rajputs and in the process use the Rajputs as the sword arm of the empire, or as some recent thinking suggests, whether the Mughals were trying to use the Rajputs against the rebellious nobles in Akbar's court. Or there is a new thinking which has developed that it was part and parcel of a larger policy of alliance with the zamindars, because after the expulsion of the Mughals from India by the Afghans, it had been realised that they would not be able to rule over India without the alliance of the zamindars—a point which is underlined by Abul Fazi in the Akbarnamah, in the time of Humayun, before Akbar came to the throne, a point also emphasised by Farid Bhakkari in his well-known work Zakhirat-ul-Khawanin written in the middle of the seventeenth century. Now, none of these theories fully fit. My detailed analysis in the seminar tries to show that what is called Akbar's 'Rajput policy* really comes to fruition around the year 1578-79. And that the role of the marriage with the Kachchawaha family has been rather overestimated because during this early phase although Bhagwant Das and Man Singh are close to Akbar, we do not find any large-scale involvement of the Rajputs in the fighting which goes on at the time. In fact it is noticeable that when some of the Uzbek nobles rose in rebellion and Bhagwant Das was at the court of Akbar, he was given the responsibility of guarding the Imperial camp including the royal ladies. This was individually an important charge but it did not signify any great faith on Akbar's part in the fighting capabilities of the Rajputs, or should we say, no special effort on his part, no special desire on his part to use the Rajputs as some kind of a makeweight. It is also possible to argue that the type of matrimonial relationships which Akbar had, whereby the girl was not alienated from the family, was also not unique—not only were such alliances a part of the political horse-trading, shall we say, or political manoeuvre, it was something which had developed from the fifteenth century onwards. For instance, Ratnavati, the daughter of Jodhpur's ruler Maldeo, had been married earlier to Haji Khan Pathan, who was one of the slaves of Sher Shah. After the death of Haji Khan Pathan, Ratnavati comes back to the house of Chandrasen. She lives there, and finally dies in Jodhpur in 1592, if I remember the date, and we are told by Banke Dass in his well known Khyat that a gumthi was made in her name there. Now, a gumthi, for your information, is not a tomb because when you